The Most Vile Toxin
by Dark Blaze1
Summary: A moment of reflection. Language slightly poetic. Just read. POV. Pairing implied. Shonen-ai-ish (if you want to look at it that way)


Title: The Most Vile Toxin  
  
By Dark Blaze  
  
Pairing: implied  
  
Warnings: spoilers, POV, implied shonen-ai, slight OOC  
  
  
  
Loneliness is poison that seeps into your veins and flesh, constricting every beat of your heart with heaviness. It clogs your throat, making each breath a conscious effort that requires courage and strength to take. It clouds your mind, until it is almost impossible to think of anything. It numbs your body and soul until you can't concentrate on anything else, much less feel. It steals your smile and chance of happiness. It pushes you to the point of paranoia and desperation. It's the strongest poison in every sense.  
  
I was filled with this poison. With each breath that I took, I was reminded that I was lonely, and I had nothing and no one. With each heartbeat, the heaviness in my chest grew. With each mission that I accomplished, I felt even more empty. I had nothing to live for.  
  
He told me nothing that I didn't already know. He said I didn't live and simply existed. In that, he was right. That, I had already known since long ago.  
  
He told me missions weren't everything there was in life. That too, I knew. But I was not living. I simply existed. To me, missions were the only excuses I had to continue to exist. Without them, there was no more reason to go on.  
  
He told me my heart was made out of ice. That was partially true. I was numb and incapable of experiencing feelings like the ones that made him able to smile and laugh after a mission. I was capable of anger and guilt, but not much else. My heart, in this sense, was made out of ice.  
  
He told me I didn't have to feel this way. Lonely and alone. A part of me agreed with him. However, this was the only way I knew to live.. Iie. This was the only way I knew to exist. I didn't know how to not feel this way.  
  
Like him, Relena too, believed that I could be so much more than a simple tool of war. However, whereas he saw me as only a human, Relena believed I was a hero, a prince, a knight in his shining armor, whose strength she could count on. She believed that I would never fail, even though I *had* failed and had killed thousands of innocents, and she knew this as well. It was irony in every sense, since I was weak, weaker than her, and I was certainly not a hero.  
  
She tried hard to make me feel. She followed me everywhere during the war, partly to reassure herself that I was still around to lend her strength, and partly to convince myself that I could indeed open up and feel and be happy if only I wanted to. After the war, after she found me again, she offered me a place to stay with her, so she could keep an eye on me and help me in starting to live. She didn't understand that it wasn't that I didn't want to live. I simply didn't know how to live. She tried to mold the soldier into a prince she could be proud of without giving enough room for the transition to process. She didn't have enough time or patience to wait for the soldier to degress back into a boy and for the boy to grow into a man.  
  
On the contrary, he didn't demand me to change for him. He simply felt and gave freely and willingly. He refused to take orders and did as he pleased. He never hesitated to step up to me and argue with me when he thought I was being stupid and irrational. On the other hand, when he knew he had been wrong, he never hesitated to apologize. He told me once that sometimes he also felt hollow inside, especially after a hard mission. It took almost a month of working together and five missions before I understood that for him, a hard mission wasn't necessarily a difficult mission but rather a mission that required a lot of killing. Once he admitted that sometimes his grin and jokes were the only things that kept him sane. It made sense then that he laughed so much more after a mission. It was an irony that he called himself Death.  
  
I took her offer and stayed with her as her companion and bodyguard, but in the end I left her again. It was just as well. By the time I decided to leave, we had both reached the point when we couldn't deny anymore that we were better apart. She was an important political figure. I was anything but, and I had absolutely no interest in politics. I was just a soldier. She had matured enough to know I would never be her knight, and I had stayed long enough to know that nothing would change.  
  
I still felt empty.  
  
I don't know why I went to him. He didn't ask either. When he found out that I didn't have a place to stay anymore, he offered to share his small apartment with me until I found my own place. It was as simple as that. With his help, I moved to the apartment next door when it became vacant, and under his recommendation I joined the Preventers. It seemed to be the next logical step to do. It also gave me an excuse to continue to exist. Not too surprisingly, once again I was partnered with him.  
  
He had changed much since the last time I had seen him. He was quieter though still cheerful. He had also developed a different set of smiles to replace his customary maniac grin, though he was still generous and honest with his emotions. He no longer joked around when the moment required for complete seriousness and concentration, but he never failed to make everyone laugh when he thought the tension was too high. He was still not afraid to tell me to fuck off. He wasn't afraid to voice his opinion and argue with his superiors, including Une, the head of the Preventers, his boss and employer. With a sentence, he could make everyone like him and become aggravated at him at the same time. How he did that is still beyond me. Sometimes the obvious eluded him, though. In a way, he was just as big of an idiot as I was.  
  
Right now, that idiot is lying in the hospital bed because he was stupid enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and got himself shot twice. There was so much blood when he was taken in, and during the long four hours operation, none of us thought he would make it. He remained unconscious after the operation for two more days. Now though, he is simply asleep.  
  
In the brief moment he was awake, I told him what an idiot he was. He replied with an, "it takes one to know one."  
  
As I watch him sleep now, I realize he was right. I'm a total, complete idiot, even more than he is. I no longer feel the emptiness. I haven't for sometime, though I never realized it before. Somehow, gradually, he cleaned my body from the poison that had consumed me until I could breath, think, feel, and live. He did it so subtly and with such patience, a word that I never thought I would ever associate with him, that I didn't realize that I had lived for quite some time until now.  
  
I feel the muscles of my face shift from an expression of surprise to one of wonderment. I try to analyze and calculate the exact moment he started filling the emptiness in me, but I can't pinpoint that moment. Instead, I find myself analyzing what he has said and done, especially when directed toward me, and I wonder if he really means them the way I think he does.  
  
And suddenly I realize something. Loneliness might be the strongest poison ever to exist, but the most vile toxin is hope.  
  
I have hope in me now.  
  
~OWARI~ 


End file.
